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Personal Stories: The Roots of Empathy in action

Yesterday once again, I’ve used the “Personal Stories“retrospective exercise that I’ve shared in my workbook “Forming Agile Teams”, to help another team that I’m currently coaching (composed by 6 infrastructure specialists), with building the roots to empathize with each other.

How the activity goes?

If you see it high level it goes like this:

First you invite participants to play the game as a way to get to know each other better.

Then you explain the rules of it.

Once everyone got it, you give everyone’s time to create their own wall.

Finally, you listen people’s stories and watch their reactions and comments.

What have I learned?

Just to give an idea about how lucky I’m to do what I do for living, I had the chance to learn all these about my colleagues:

Someone loves to eat steaks close to blue color, which means almost raw. He has issues when going to restaurants because of it. He said he is really competitive in sports!

There is this guy who used to go to Geography classes when we was in the middle of its Engineering Bach. He almost lose his Engineering career because of it, and he confess that he could be hours on google maps, exploring places around the globe.

Another one shared his dream about becoming a Video game commentator, maybe in youtube one day.

The one who love walking in the forest with some friends during the winter season and his story about eating Ice Cream at the top of a mountain, once they got lost once upon a time.

The multilingual guy, whom’s live put him into several situations where he didn’t master the native spoken language of the place.

The one who shared that he got into cha-cha, salsa and other dance styles classes for at least 3 years back in the early days of his life.

And myself sharing about my 13 years as a baseball player and how I ended owning a primary school by hazard for around 7 years, when I was in my beloved country Venezuela.

What have I saw?

All that sharing happened in an environment of camaraderie. Our faces were illuminated by beautiful and bug smiles. We felt happy by sharing our own stories, it was fascinating to witness all that and I believe that was because we were vulnerable and courageous enough to open our hearts and share with others, small but important things.

The roots of empathy in action

Empathize means to engage with others, and that’ what I felt we all did yesterday. And believed or not, that’s a great starting point for greater things to happen, specially when we are the ones helping people develop their selves around technology, in trust.